Smartbike Mobility

Overview

A self-rental urban mobility platform that lets riders locate, unlock, and return bicycles from their phone, while giving operators live visibility into fleet usage, hardware health, and revenue. Rider apps, smart-lock firmware integration, backend services, and analytics were built as one system rather than assembled from parts.

The problem

Bike-sharing operators run two businesses at once — a consumer app and a physical fleet — and neither works if the other is unreliable. The platform had to drive smart locks in unpredictable street conditions, keep mobile interactions fast enough that riders never doubted whether an unlock had registered, report operational data accurate enough to act on, and expand to new cities without an engineer intervening per deployment.

What we built

Customer mobile applications

Flutter apps covering discovery, unlock, ride, and return, built so the rider always knows the state of the lock in front of them.

Smart lock and IoT integration

Bluetooth unlocking and device communication designed to fail safe: when connectivity drops, the lock's behaviour is still predictable.

Operator dashboard

An Angular fleet-management interface for station status, hardware faults, and rebalancing decisions.

Backend services

Node.js APIs arbitrating between riders, hardware, and billing, with transactional guarantees around rentals.

Analytics and monitoring

Real-time utilisation and performance dashboards operators use to move bikes before a station empties.

How we approached it

• Reliability under variable connectivity is a design constraint, not an error path
• User actions get fast, predictable responses — a lock either opened or it did not
• Operational insight is real-time, because fleet decisions expire quickly
• New cities are a configuration change, not a redesign

Outcome

A production platform running continuously at scale, with mobile apps, IoT devices, backend services, and analytics operating as a single system across multi-station deployments.